Forming Words

Now that you are familiar with the Pashto alphabet and diacritics, you will soon be able to learn how to form words. The Arabic script (the script that Pashto is based on) has letters that actually change form depending on where they are located in a certain word.

How Do Words Form?

Basically, letters are joined and connected together to form different words. The way that these letters appear in these words depends on where they are located within the words.

• If a letter appears at the start of a word, it will take on its initial form.
• If a letter appears in the middle of a word, it will take on its medial form.
• If a letter appears at the end of a word, it will take on its final form.

Furthermore, letters typically have understood diacritics on them. However, these diacritics are usually not written out, often only showing themselves in dictionaries to help readers achieve the correct pronunciation. For the most part, diacritics are meant to be understood by the reader without being explicitly denoted. Below is an example of a full word in Pashto.

Below is the same word, but this time, the word has been marked with diacritics.

Pronouncing These Words

We have formed a word. Now, how do we pronounce it?

As I mentioned in my lesson on diacritics, pronouncing a letter with a diacritic takes two steps.

1. The sound of just the letter is pronounced.
2. Then, pronounce the diacritic shortly after that.

The same process is relevant for pronouncing full words. Take a look at the word "Pashto" again. The letter pe has a zwarakay diacritic over it, so that first part of the word reads [pə] (the IPA pronunciation).

If a letter has no diacritic over it even when other letters have them, it will typically be pronounced without any sort of diacritic modifier. Since there is no diacritic over the xīn, the letter xīn reads as one of [ʂ/ʃ/ç/x]. (The sound you choose comes down to your dialect.)

The letter te features a pex diacritic, suggesting that it could either be pronounced as [t̪u] or [t̪o]. Unfortunately, it may be a bit difficult to know the correct option unless you have already been told it. In a dictionary with English and Pashto, a solution might be to transliterate the word into English and emphasize the correct pronunciation: [t̪o].

Putting it all together, we have all of the following as acceptable pronunciations of "Pashto":

• [pəʂ't̪o]
• [pəʃ't̪o]
• [pəç't̪o]
• [pəx't̪o]

(Note that the syllable stress was not really implied when the word was written. This also typically needs to be specified in some way or known beforehand.)